Despite 5-5 frame, Astros’ Altuve measures up as big-time hitter

OK, there’s something if not funny then a little jarring about Jose Altuve’s height.

We want our athletes to be superhuman, and that often means supersized, so 5-5 tends to stand out as much as Yao Ming. The jokes follow in turn.

Televised tales of the tape when the Astros second baseman faces giants like 6-11 pitcher Jon Rauch. A website called howmanyaltuves.com is devoted to converting measurements 65 inches at a time. A jockey costume at Altuve’s locker for rookie hazing day.

That last one is where the jokes should stop. Not because it’s inappropriate — Altuve took it well. It’s just that while Altuve is a jockey’s height, he’s not a jockey size, and that’s where the baseball implications of all this begin.

Why shouldn’t a 5-5 player be able to hit .313 with a .451 slugging percentage? Why are we so fascinated by this?

We shouldn’t be, because really — to listen to baseball people and even a physics professor tell it — hitting isn’t about height.

“You’re trying to get the bat at the right place at the right time with as high a bat speed as possible,” said Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois and author of the website “The Physics of Baseball.” “Getting the high bat speed requires strength. Having a compact swing helps you do that. Having more weight also helps you do that, provided you know how to utilize that weight properly.”

So a jockey shouldn’t be able to hit because a jockey has to hit weight targets, often in the low 100s. Altuve, listed now at his more honest height of 5-5 rather than the 5-7 fudging in the past, weighs 170 pounds, and while that’s the lightest of any active Astros player, it’s hardly freakish.

Hitting is about transferring energy from a swing into the contact between bat and ball, and Nathan said a player’s bat speed is approximately proportional to the square root of his weight.

Tiny strike zone a plus

So while Justin Maxwell, Altuve’s teammate who has hit some of the longest home runs of the year, is a foot taller than Altuve and 65 pounds (or 38.2 percent) heavier, the difference in square roots is just 17.6 percent. Beyond that approximation, it’s all in the technique, and that’s where Astros hitting coach Mike Barnett thinks Altuve shines.

“He’s got plenty of strength, and the thing that he does is he puts himself in good position to hit,” Barnett said. “He’s got a very good knack for being able to stay inside the baseball and use his hands.”

There also are advantages to being 5-5, regardless of weight, most notably the compact strike zone a pitcher must hit. Altuve, 22, has yet to exploit that in drawing walks, which is a result of his aggressive approach to the fastball, which he has been seeing slightly less of in his second year. (He’s seeing roughly twice as many curveballs, according to Fangraphs data.)

Shades of Pedroia

When being interviewed about Altuve on numerous occasions during the player’s rise to third place in All-Star voting among second basemen, manager Brad Mills loves to draw comparisons to Dustin Pedroia. The 5-8 (maybe) Pedroia won the American League MVP award in 2008 while Mills was the Boston bench coach.

Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow also uses Pedroia as the standard.

“I think Dustin Pedroia opened a lot of people’s eyes,” Luhnow said about eliminating scouting biases against shorter position players. “Last year, the Cardinals drafted (5-9) Kolten Wong with their first pick in the draft — a shortstop out of Hawaii. It’s a perception that shorter players don’t have the stamina or can’t impact the force.

“You look at what Jose’s been able to do here similar to Kolten Wong and Dustin Pedroia, pound-for-pound very strong players able to generate over-the-fence power. Those guys don’t have light-tower power like some of the bigger guys do, but I don’t think we should be surprised.”

So perhaps the conjunction has to change. “Jose Altuve is short, but he can hit” doesn’t really do much. It’s more like “Jose Altuve is short, and he can hit.”